Jake and Jessie's Theory of Intradimensional Travel
by pepperamac
Summary: Alternate realities? I think yes. This is such a rough basic first chapter. I'm only posting it to motivate myself to continue it. Please leave me some feedback. Super.


I usually never slept past 5 o'clock. It was a habit I'd had for years, and one that, even on my days off, I couldn't seem to break. Today, however was an exception. My brother was visiting from out of town and I hadn't seen him in over a year. I'd missed him and his crazy ideas, and we'd talked long into the night about new projects that he was working on. He had spent his youth reading and watching science fiction. He'd always been caught up in it, and had always had an active and curious imagination. Ever since we were little he'd been able to see how things worked simply by studying them. It had served him well when he entered the work force. He'd become a very well-respected and self proclaimed "idea man" for several major networks. Anyone who was anyone who wanted to put on a sci-fi show/movie, you-name-it would come to him to find out if their ideas were realistic and how could they transfer them from their imagination to the big screen.

His current obsession (and that's what they were, obsessions. Long ago I'd noticed that every time he came across an idea that intrigued him he would become utterly obsessed with it until he a.) figured out what made it work or b.) decided it was actually called science fiction for a reason and was probably impossible. So far there had been a lot of b and very little a) was time travel. It was an old favorite. One of the very few ideas that he hadn't ruled out as being impossible or solved yet. He kept coming back to it for as long as I could remember. It had also been the focus of last night's conversation and the reason that, at ten o'clock (five hours after I would have normally been up and at em') I was still an unconscious heap on my futon.

That is, I _was_ an unconscious heap on my futon until Jake barged into my room. Now, I say 'barged' in an actual loving effort to help him retain any dignity he might from my lack of description as to what actually happened. However, we can revisit. What he actually did was come running down the hardwood hallway in his socks and when he tried and failed to stop, his feet flew out from under him, sending him crashing to the ground. The laptop he had been carrying like some sort of Viking shield high above his head, flew from his fingertips and was propelled miraculously onto the bed cushions at my feet, saving it a horrible fate. My brother wasn't so lucky however. I woke up from the clatter just in time to see him, still moaning from his fall, reach up to my end table to haul himself to his feet. That end table that was supposed to have four legs and only had two, that I had jury rigged with a couple of two by fours to keep it level so I could put a lamp on it for late night bed reading.

Before I could shout a warning, the makeshift legs collapsed under his weight, the table smacked him in the forehead and across the eye, and the lamp slid towards him. I cringed certain I was about to see him whacked yet again in the space of two minutes, but just as his fearful eyes made the connection with what was about to happen, the lamp stopped short of his nose, held fast by the cord that was plugged in behind my bed. He sighed in relief and, rubbing his head, rolled onto the end of my futon.

"Are you okay?" I asked, now fully awake.

"Is the computer okay?" He winced back, eyes closed.

I lifted the laptop and gave it cursory examination. "Seems fine. Landed on the bed."

"Then yes, I'm fine."

I rolled my eyes and swung my legs over the side of the bed, trying to straighten my loose flannel pajama pants that had gotten all twisted in my sleep. I stood and righted the end table, readjusting the two by fours back into place and straightened the lamp shade. Jake rolled more fully onto the bed, oblivious to what was quickly becoming a black eye from the end table, and hit a few buttons on the computer, sighing in relief at whatever he saw.

"What's up?" I asked, still a little annoyed that I had been woken up in such a manner, and that I had to be woken up at all.

The look on his face, however, soon made me forget my irritation. It hinted that something big had taken place, and that I was the first to know.

"Okay," he began, his eyes dilating like a kid on Christmas. "So we were talking about time travel last night and….well let's be honest, I've been talking about time travel for years and nothing has come of it." I nodded for him to continue, but it seemed he didn't need the encouragement. "What I _should_ have been spending my time on was something much more elegant in it's simplicity…well….simplicity in the _idea _of it, not necessarily in putting it into practice. Instead of traveling forward or backward to a fixed point in time, which _has always seemed_ simple enough, what would actually be even easier is to travel side to side and never change your time at all."

I blinked a couple of times, starting to catch on. "Are you talking about…?"

"Alternate dimensions. Yes."

I sighed and sat back down across from him on the futon. "Okay. Here's the thing. Time travel is, and I couldn't tell you why but it is, more believable to me than alternate realities. Or getting to them."

My brother chuckled and shook his head. "But why? Probably because time travel has been fictionally _done_ so. Many. Times. Alternate realities aren't usually made to look so realistic in movies. For some reason we find it easier to suspend our disbelief when it comes to revisiting something that's already happened, or dropping in on something that's going to happen. Maybe because it's the same timeline, and if it's something that's already happened we have a somewhat tangible memory of it that helps it seem real, and if it's something that's going to happen, it's easier for us to see the events that would take place to lead us to that definite conclusion. Maybe it's harder to believe in alternate realities, because EVERY conclusion is possible, no matter the timeline. We wouldn't even know where to start because it's ALL happened. And it all WILL happen. Really, it is a much more simple and less defined theory. We humans are weird in our beliefs."

I shook my head. He had a fucking gift to make me actually consider the possibility of some of this stuff. "Okay, let's say for the sake of curiosity I think alternate realities are possible. That's a far jump from believing you can get to them."

"Au contraire! So the first step is to admit to yourself that the multiverse is an infinite honeycomb of universes, each housing every possible outcome of every possible situation and every possible choice that would or could have been made. You may be aware of only one universe right now, but suppose that the others exist in some alternate dimensions and you aren't aware of them. On a personal level, for every choice or even you experienced, some YOU in another reality made a different choice and experienced a different outcome. It branches out infinitely. So, in some other dimension there are other YOUs living completely different lives."

"Or not living at all. Our parents could have never met. Or…you know, something more drastic."

He nodded vigorously. "That's true. And, honestly, preferable if we were to go to a dimension where, for instance, you were famous or we had publicly died, it would be….problematic for us to just show up."

"True. Still doesn't answer how we would even get there."

"That is what I've been working on all night. So, a lot of scientists will tell you that the world, galaxy, universe, everything basically can be described or solved using mathematical equations, right?"

"Right."

"Okay, well it struck me as kind of important that all these scientists have been struggling on the theory of Tran dimensional travel for a few different reasons. First, they don't believe in it, so they're actually trying to _disprove_ it, which is a lot easier. Second, they are too focused on building off other's work that failed. Third, they are trying to open a doorway into an alternate reality instead of simply _finding_ a doorway that's already been created." 

"But," I started. "That's operating under the assumption that, in a multiverse full of infinite choices and possibilities, someone would have had to have come to _this_ exact reality. Seems slim."

"But it really isn't," he insisted. "In a multiverse full of infinite choices and possibilities, someone would have basically _had_ to come here. Every possible choice has been made and, slim of a chance as it may be, it is a chance. It is a choice. So it was made. There is a doorway."

My head was spinning. "So how would you find it?"

Here, he smiled and held up a hand. "That's the fun part. You see, it took me considerably less time to convince myself of the possibility of traveling intra-dimensionally then it did for me to convince you. So, back to mathematical equations, I had a lot of time last night to write a program that will read the dimensional space around us and weed out any normal signatures allowing us to find any…discrepancies."

My jaw dropped. "Are you telling me that, not only is this crazy thing possible, but you found a way to do it?"

"Yes."

And with that, he turned the computer screen towards me.


End file.
